


and now she's breathing fire

by anothercover



Category: Game of Thrones (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Game of Thrones Fusion, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Family Feels, Sisters
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-07
Updated: 2017-08-20
Packaged: 2018-12-12 04:15:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 9,765
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11729304
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anothercover/pseuds/anothercover
Summary: She’s mired in some silent war, and he wants to tell her that whatever secrets she needs to keep, she ought to hold onto if freeing them gives her this much strife.The rest of him knows to hold his tongue. Tasha will do what Tasha will do, always, and if she’s decided he’s someone she wants to spend her secrets on, his job is to deserve them.[Game of Thrones AU, in which Natasha is a lost Targaryen and Clint is a bastard sellsword.]





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Basically, the Infinity War poster is mostly to blame for this. I saw it, I yelped "NATASHA SUDDENLY HAS DAENERYS TARGARYEN HAIR WHAT WHAT WHAAAAT?" to some friends, and then, um, a quick pause from 'catching bullets in our teeth' and five thousand words later, here we are? I promise the next part of that is coming very soon? This is self indulgent as fuck? I always forget I'm capable of having feelings about GoT until it comes around again? I also have a lot of feelings about how both Dany and Nat are people who would both be really happy if they had a sister who understood them? A N Y W A Y.

  
  
When they meet, her hair is cropped short and blazingly, brilliantly red. 

He proposes a partnership and she turns him down. “I can take care of myself,” she says flatly, but really, the headless body of the man at her feet announced that much without words. She’s cleaning her scythe methodically, and he adds it to the list of things he knows: she respects her blade, but it’s an affectionless respect, which is more or less the exact opposite of how he has always felt about his bow. 

“Yes,” he agrees. “Still. Two together are safer than one.”

The next thing he adds to the list is the way her mouth tightens at his words, the flash of rage in her cold green eyes that she smothers as fast as it appears. 

“I’ll share my food,” he adds.

That’s the back of what they’re born on: a split apple, a hunk of cheese, a loaf of bread ripped in half. 

She lifts a jug of wine from a merchant in the street too many hours into sampling his own wares to notice, and they feast on the rooftop where he’s made his home for the last few weeks. The sun sinks behind the pyramids, the wine is warm, and years down the line, he’ll look back at that night and understand that what he was feeling, for the first time in his life, was peace.

+

Even for someone wary of hiring young sellswords, two-for-the-price-of-one is a hard bargain to pass up. They’re efficient and ruthless in a pair, and soon, they never want for business. 

For his part, Clint is an open book. He’ll tell Tasha anything she asks to know and plenty she doesn’t besides. 

She’s slower. She lets things out in tiny increments; if she takes two steps forward one day, she’ll have to run backwards the next.

But he’s patient. With Tasha, he is a different person – he’s not soft, or gentle, or kind, he knows that about himself, but with Tasha, those things come to him without effort.

She’s cleaning the cuts on his hands one night, a series of shallow, nasty bites that happened when he barreled through a pane of glass, palms first. “If my brother was alive, he’d have called me an ass in at least three languages by now,” he tells her. “I admire your restraint.”

“Oh, it’s only that I’m still choosing my insults,” she says, but she looks up at him from under her eyelashes and smiles, a warm curl of her mouth that soothes the sting in his hands. 

He’s so busy committing that smile to memory that he almost misses the next part. “I had a brother,” she tells him.

“Did you then?” he says, surprised. She nods, lowering his eyes back to her work. “Where is he now?”

“Dead as yours, if I’ve any luck at all.” Her fingertips swirl in a circle along his palm, a last inspection to make sure no shards of glass are still embedded. “He was a spoilt boy and not close to clever enough to be a proper monster, but that never stopped him from making a go at it.”

“Was it only the two of you?” he asks. He’s pressing his luck, he knows, but it’s less to feed his curiosity and more to calm some storm inside him, beginning to roil at thoughts of her suffering. Even if she broke away and got free – that she would ever – 

“No,” she says. 

For a long moment, he thinks that all she’ll say on the matter. Just as he’s decided it’s enough to content him, she speaks again. So quietly that he understands the words are not really intended for him; it’s a reaffirmation to herself, to someone else, a private promise. 

“I have a sister.”

+

The heat is something that never completely abates, but a fortnight later, it edges just past intolerable. Sweat runs in rivulets down Tasha’s back, sticking her dress to her body in several very interesting ways.

Clint is trying to pretend he doesn’t notice when his eyes catch on something else entirely and a noise of distress escapes him. He doesn’t wait for her permission, pulls her down an alley and sets his hands urgently to the back of her neck.

Tasha swats at him like he’s a pet, the touch welcome, the timing not. “Clint, stop.” 

“You’re bleeding,” he says shortly. 

“I’m – what? I’m not – “

“Did you get hit? Were you hurt? Why didn’t you _tell me_ ,” he says furiously as his fingers work to trace the streaks of red leaking down her skin back to their source. Scalp wounds bleed wildly, he knows, it’s not as though she’s slurring her speech or showing signs of pain, but the angry thud against the walls of his chest won’t be calmed without assurances. 

Tasha claps a hand to the back of her neck, eyes gone wide.

+

She takes him to a room in the beating heart of the city, spends enough coin for one with heavy oaken doors and a private soaking tub. “You won’t believe me unless I show you,” she’d said crisply.

But now that they’re climbing the stairs, her struggle with herself is visible. She’s mired in some silent war, and he wants to tell her that whatever secrets she needs to keep, she ought to hold onto if freeing them gives her this much strife. 

The rest of him knows to hold his tongue. Tasha will do what Tasha will do, always, and if she’s decided he’s someone she wants to spend her secrets on, his job is to deserve them.

The room is cool and dim, pleasantly fragrant from the scented oils pooling atop the water in the tub. Tasha begins to unclothe; her dress is dirty - their things are almost always dirty - but it’s airy and good for the weather. It takes no time at all to puddle at her feet and Clint looks away.

He’s seen naked women before. Naked Tasha is something in another realm entirely. 

He doesn’t look up until he hears the water slosh against the sides of the beaten copper tub. She’s lowered herself into it and he can see nothing beneath the slope of her shoulders, kissed pink from the sun.

She looks at him with her arresting green eyes, weighting the moment out, and he understands – he doesn’t know why, but he understands – whatever is coming next might change things for them. It might. There’s no guard against that. There’s only his belief that what he said to her the day they met is still the truth. 

Two together are safer than one.

“I’m with you,” he tells her.

She nods, and breathes, and sinks beneath the water.

+

When she’s scrubbed every bit of dye from her hair, the water is red as new-spilled blood. 

But the color hidden beneath is even more brilliant. Even soaking wet and darkened with water, her hair is so entirely white. Fresh milk, first snow, dandelion floss. So white that when the light pouring in from the highest window catches in it, it looks almost – 

_Silver_.

It hits him like a shot to the gut, the breath knocked from his body as forcibly as if she’d belted him with the handle of her scythe. 

She’s standing before him entirely naked, body and soul bared, and he knows that she sees the moment he realizes. He doesn’t know what to do. What to say. 

“Why red?” is what he asks. 

It surprises her. “If you hide in plain sight, the world does the work for you.”

It’s an optical illusion of sorts. If he tilts his head one way, he’s looking at Tasha, his partner, his best friend, the person who knows him best in the world. Tilt it the other and she’s unmistakably Targaryen. One of the vanished Stormborn twins, and he wonders how he could have ever missed it. How anyone could; she is brilliant at disappearing inside anyone she needs to become, but she has always, _always_ been a fine and rare thing. 

He’s known that from the first. 

He walks to her as though he’s in a trance and she waits for him, holding herself perfectly still as the droplets carve paths down her pale skin. 

“Nhataerya,” she says. “In case you wondered - ”

“I didn’t wonder,” he says.

+

They fuck for the first time that night.

There is a conversation to be had, a story for her to tell and questions for him to ask now that her guardgate is pulled up and he’s allowed all the way through. They’re both clever enough to know a rented room is no place to have it; there are ears and eyes everywhere.

But they’ve paid for the whole night and neither of them wants to give up this cool, perfumed interlude. The urgency to _have_ that conversation and the prospect of a full night’s wait sends them crashing into each other, propelled by some force larger than they are to make assurances.

If they cannot speak out loud, their bodies can do the talking for them. 

He has wanted this for months and has never spoken a word. It’s sweet beyond the telling of it, this new knowledge that she has, too, that he’s not alone with this burning need and he never was. 

She straddles his lap with her skin still damp, and as he tastes every sweet inch of her, _fucking_ hardly seems the word. 

They’re fierce and ravenous, her kisses burn his mouth and he swallows her moans like he can lock them away inside himself to recall if he’s ever without. They collide with each other as though they’re trying to bring the world down around them, but still, it’s too coarse a word. 

There should be a new language for something this decadent, something that’s sated pieces of himself he hadn’t thought existed, something that means blood and fire and sweetness and home, but he’s a bastard gutter rat whose only skill is killing, and _fucking_ is all he knows to call it.

+

Her sister, she says, was sold to the Dothraki in exchange for a khalasar. Forty thousand riders to take back the Iron Throne on their brother’s behalf - their brother, a man whose name makes Nat’s upper lip curl in derision. 

The Stormborn girls, the twin dragons, Nhataerya with her spine of steel and Daenerys always the more pliable of the two. Each of them made stronger by the other. Of course he’d want to split them apart.

There would be no place for Nat with the khal’s riders and in the end, she hadn’t waited to find out what the alternate plan was, the value the men would put on _her_ worth to buy a Targaryen victory in the Seven Kingdoms. 

Nat took different ideas away from the stories they were both told as they grew up. 

Three nights before her sister’s wedding, she had begged Daenerys to come away with her. When her sister couldn’t bring herself to do it, she’d kissed her on both cheeks and swore to her they would meet again. That they would find each other somehow.

Then she’d cut her hair and changed its color, disappeared from Illyrio’s estate in Pentos dressed as a kitchen girl with as much coin and food as she could carry hidden in the folds of her skirts. She vanished into the far reaches of Essos and pressed out further every time, until she had met Clint.

That’s the woman Clint knows. That’s who he has always known. Whatever she calls herself, the core of her – that’s the same. Nat who doesn’t wait for decisions to be made on her behalf; Nat who bets on herself and her own wits and her own sword every time.

Daenerys, she says, is the one to whom things like the family name have always mattered. Duty, honor, the birthright of House Targaryen. 

For her part, she says, she will not enter into contracts for the dead or the undeserving.

+

In the end, it changes nothing but the name he calls her.

+

This world is an ugly, unforgiving place with no guarantees. Three steps in the wrong direction and people come to a swift end, there is unimaginable brutality never more than a stone’s throw from any given front door. They keep moving, they never touch down for long. It’s hard to hit a moving target.

In spite of this: they find happiness in each other. 

A dangerous happiness, really. Happiness with another person is the sort that can be taken away in little more than an eyeblink. They’re neither of them so naïve as to not realize it.

Still. Their second year passes much like their first, and all things weighed equally, Clint would call them good years. 

When the invitation to join the Second Sons finds them, they’re both cautious, but Nat is more hesitant.

“More people,” she points out. “More risk.”

His head is buried between her thighs; he feels vaguely insulted that she can still talk. “I was trying to complete an urgent task, princess.”

She tugs on his hair without any gentleness and he grins against the inside of her leg. She loathes it when he calls her that, so he makes sure to do it only when he’s in a position to swiftly get himself out of trouble.

“Better pay,” he counters as he returns to his work. “Safer city.”

Her back arches beneath him, breath coming quick as he takes her higher, one of her ankles digging in below his shoulder. His hand smooths along her belly; he lingers too long before letting it slip toward her breast. Children, he knows, are not in the cards for them, not with this life and not with her family name, but he would be lying if he said it hasn’t crossed his mind. What it would be like to see their child grow within her. 

But it’s a flight of fancy and one of his more foolish ones. He brings her to her peak once, twice, before he moves back up her body and buries himself inside her. She makes a contented noise and nuzzles the side of his neck.

“I don’t like Yunkai,” she tells him as they rock together in a slow, easy rhythm. “I don’t like any of the cities in Slaver’s Bay, if we’re being honest.”

“Oh, you and me, we’re honest folk,” he says, and bites her lip. She grins and drags the blunt edge of her nails along his spine in response. “And as long as we’re being honest, you _do_ like killing the masters. Probably more contracts for that in the Bay.”

“That’s true.” She drops the conversation then, as he’s suddenly barreling towards his own end, undone by the unexpected; the wrinkle of thought in her forehead, the scrunch of her nose, the way she tightens herself around him.

He doesn’t roll off her body. He nestles his head between her breasts and lets her stroke his hair. 

“I suppose I don’t like the idea of selling our allegiance to the highest bidder,” she says. “That’s all. I like to leave space for my own judgment.”

Clint kisses her collarbone. It’s a well-reasoned point. It’s not as though they’ve only ever put an end to people who _deserve_ death, but they are not indiscriminate butchers, either. Which isn’t to say the Second Sons are, exactly, but in an army, things become complicated in a way they aren’t with only two. 

“We could see what they have to say,” he suggests. “Spend some time and see what we think.”

“No harm in an informed opinion,” she agrees. Her hair is spread out behind her, red and pretty and in disarray, and he tangles his hands in it as he moves back up to kiss her, and kiss her, and kiss her.

+

They reach Yunkai exactly two days before Daenerys Stormborn and her Unsullied liberate the city.

Their timing is either perfect or poor, depending on how history will write it.

+

It’s a short battle, but for all Yunkai’s primary export is bedslaves, it’s a savage one, and there is no avoiding it. The two of them are swept along on the tide. 

It’s Clint’s particular kind of luck, really. Get to watch the collapse of slavery in a vile city of vile men; show up in a new city just as an invading force overtakes it. The pleasure in the perk is slightly drowned by the circumstances. 

By the end of the night, they’re both filthy, covered in blood that’s mostly not their own, and they’re still standing, which is their only rule.

Whispers have it that the Second Sons have joined with the conquering force. 

Before they make their decision, Nat says they need to understand the conqueror – it makes perfect sense, it does, and fresh from the fight, stepping over corpses and scattered weapons, they leave the city gates to learn.

At their first sight of the conqueror’s camp, Nat makes a noise that Clint has never heard from her in all their years. She seizes his hand, her mouth hanging open with shock. 

Anything he wants to say dies in his throat when the dragon swoops down from the sky and lands an arm-length away from them. 

He is frozen to the ground – his first thought is to step in front of Nat and nock an arrow, it might not buy her life, but it will buy her a few moments and she’s good with a few moments, if only his body would _move_ as the beast comes closer - 

And somehow, impossibly, the dragon lays its great, scaled head against Nat’s hip. 

As though it’s nothing more than a kitten, pleased to see its human come home. It breathes out a contented curl of smoke from its nostrils. 

Nat doesn’t move or breathe or blink. The whole word stops and balances on a knifepoint in the longest moment of their lives. 

When the dragon screeches, Clint is shocked into finally turning his eyes somewhere else, and that is when he sees her. 

She’s about Nat’s same height. Their faces are different – not identical, then, but they have the same lips, the same big eyes and sharp chins. Her silver hair is half-loose, half plaited into a thick crown of braids, and there is no mistaking her. 

She stares for so long that Clint wonders if she understands. If she can see beneath Nat’s shock of red hair, the grime and blood and dust blurring her almost unrecognizable even to him, and believe.

Nat falls to her knees as though her legs have simply been cleaved from beneath her, and Daenerys Targaryen, Mother of Dragons, Khaleesi of the Great Grass Sea and all her other titles besides, is running towards them with the dignity of a small child chasing after dessert. 

She barrels into Nat, arms flung around her as they fall to the ground, and Clint can’t tell if they’re laughing or sobbing, but his own smile is stretched wide enough to ache. 

He smiles and smiles, their joy all-encompassing as three dragons circle overhead.

+

“If we go with her, it puts us back in the middle of everything you ran from,” Clint says in their tent a few nights later. He was offered his own; Jorah smothered a laugh and Ser Barristan looked enormously disapproving when Clint asked “Why in seven hells would I want my own?”

“Do you not want us to stay?” she asks, concerned.

He kisses the tip of her nose. She’s usually the one who advocates for informed opinions, considering all the angles; right now, he knows he has to think of the logistics for both of them. 

Staying means they are not simply reuniting with Nat’s beloved sister. Staying means they are enlisting as loyalists to a cause. They’ll be part of the Queen’s force.

“I don’t _not_ ,” he says. “And I’m not asking you to walk away from your sister twice, Nat. I only think it’s worth pointing out that staying on means we’re declaring for House Targaryen. Embracing the birthright you decided once that you wanted no part of. There’s no casting it off anymore. We’re in something bigger than the two of us, now. Bigger than the Second Sons would have been.”

She considers it as her fingertips trace patterns up and down the length of his arm.

“I have no interest in the Iron Throne myself,” she says, though she doesn’t have to: Daenerys has become ambitious enough for the both of them. He knows how proud she is of the person her twin has become in her absence – this bold, self-assured conqueror that knows her own strength and value is not the same as the girl who was too afraid of defying their brother and staining the House honor to run off in the middle of the night. 

“You told me once that you don’t contract for the dead or the undeserving,” Clint says. “I suppose all we have to ask ourselves is if we think she’s deserving.”

+

In the long road that takes them from Yunkai to Meereen to Dragonstone, the hours and days and months, the death and the battles and setbacks and advances, Clint comes to believe in her the same way the rest of their number has.

Daenerys Stormborn is deserving.

He would think so even if he wasn’t gone on her sister.

+

Daario teasingly calls Nat the Black Widow one day – “You pull them into your web so sweetly and smile when you go in for the kill,” he says – and the name sticks. Nhataerya Targaryen is her twin’s right arm. Whoever Dany needs her to be, foot soldier, assassin, advisor, she becomes.

At the Queen’s request, Clint handpicks his trainees to form a unit of archers after he pointed it out as a potential weakness in her massive armies. Dragons are all well and good (“I still cannot believe that’s a sentence that came out of my mouth,” he said, making Daenerys laugh), but there could come a time when she’ll want additional aerial support, or might have to split and fight on two fronts. 

It’s the closest thing he’s ever had to a job. He finds that he enjoys it.

If he survives the coming war, he thinks he might enjoy Westeros.

+

They’re not meant to know that Daario shares the Queen’s bed most nights, but Daario is the least subtle man in the world and among the small council, there’s not much room to keep secrets. 

Still, it’s a surprise to Clint when he learns Daenerys has ended things between them shortly before they’re due to set sail. 

“I knew she didn’t love him the same way, but I didn’t think she’d leave him behind, either,” he tells Nat as she digs her knuckles into the sore muscles along his spine, loosening the tightness from the long day of drills. 

“I did,” she admits. “I don’t think she’d have had the impulse on her own, but I expected the Hand to point out the logic of the thing to her. And she’s very logical.”

He twists onto his side, turning to look up at her. “The logic?”

“She’ll need Houses to declare for her,” Nat says. “Fastest way to a solid alliance is marriage. She’ll choose well, when she has to.” 

He hums his agreement; it makes sense, as she said, and Daenerys is an unflinching pragmatist. She and Nat have that in common. 

It wakes him from a dead sleep later that night, as Nat slumbers beside him with her arm flung carelessly over his hip. She hasn’t dyed her hair since their last day in Yunkai, though she still keeps it short. It’s no longer a surprise to see all that silver on the pillow next to his.

Nat who sleeps besides him is not his wife but he has never had call to question their commitment. 

Nhataerya Targaryen is the Queen’s twin and a rare beauty with a sharp mind. Beloved by her sister, counselor to her sister, undisputed access to and ear of the crown. There are plenty of men in plenty of Houses who would need none of these attributes pointed out to them. 

She will put her sister on that throne come hell or high water. 

She would do for Daenerys what she would never consider for Viserys. 

He stays awake until the sun rises.

+

In the morning, Daenerys requests a private audience with him. His stomach sinks to the floor as Nat kisses him and sends him on his way – a quick kiss, a punctuation mark, the kind he’s grown used to before they part in the mornings.

He puts his hands on her hips and drags her up against his body for something more thorough, as though it’s his last taste of wine before being loosed in the desert. 

Her cheeks flush pink, her eyes sparkle with it. “Good morning back,” she says, cupping his face in her hands. “Hello. Is something the matter?”

“I love you,” he says. 

They very rarely say it aloud and he curses himself now for all the time spent thinking that saying it was some silly formality, that it was evident in gesture and looks and deeds, that it was enough to just know.

She runs her thumbs along the edge of his jaw, and she looks surprised, but pleased. “I love you,” she says. Easily, as though it was just sitting on the tip of her tongue. “Clint?”

“That’s all,” he tells her, and clears his throat. “I only wanted to say.”

“Silly man,” she says. “Go on. Don’t be late for Dany.”

+

The Queen is smiling when he meets her in her chambers, offers him sweet wine and candied figs and cheerfully inquires as to the shape of her aerial unit. He fields her questions as best he can while feeling as though there’s a boot pressing down on his throat.

Finally, she takes pity on him. “Well,” she says. “I suppose you understand why I’ve called you here.”

“Yes, your Grace,” he replies.

“Good. That’s very good.” She sips her wine. “What sort of preparations have you discussed?”

He’s confused. “Preparations, your Grace?”

“For the wedding, of course.”

He must look as lost as he feels, because Daenerys huffs out an impatient sort of sigh. “Clint, if I may be direct. I understand that you are not a highborn and that certain social niceties are often entirely beyond your comprehension in ways that are, occasionally, a mild embarrassment.”

Clint doesn’t take offense. He’s always been sort of proud of that point, and besides, he can _learn_ the rules. He just has a very liquid sense of which ones are the breakable sort. 

“Even so. We sail for Westeros at the week’s end, and you must understand the importance of appearance.” When she sees that he’s still lost, she spells it out for him directly: “A Targaryen princess cannot return to her homeland for the first time carrying a bastard, Clint. This all needs to be legitimized.”

It takes a very long moment for the words to arrange themselves into something he can comprehend. 

When they do, he sits. Abruptly, onto the divan across from Daenerys. His legs don’t appear to want to hold him up right now. 

Her face changes entirely – it’ll never not amaze him, this gift that she and Nat both share, her ability to be so entirely Queen of the Seven Kingdoms in one breath and plain Dany in the next. “You didn’t know,” she says, gently.

“No,” he manages. “She didn’t tell me.”

Daenerys hands him the goblet of wine he rebuffed. This time, he takes it and drains the cup in nearly one pull. “Are you certain?”

“Quite.” She smiles. “I assume you aren’t opposed to the marriage.”

“Of course I’m not!” he says. “I’d have done it years ago, there just – there was never a need.”

“Well. There’s a need now. There’s no time for anything grand as she deserves, of course, but it needs to be done before we set sail. Tomorrow, if you can manage it. She’s not so far gone that travel will be a danger, though I expect she’ll be terribly uncomfortable.”

“She won’t complain. You know that.”

The Queen refills his wine and tops off her own besides. “The rest can be worked out on the other side of the coming war. Dragonstone may suit the two of you, once I take my place in King’s Landing, but there will be other options. We’ll find something respectable for you.”

Everything she says is something Clint knows he should have considered long before now – did he think that he could cheerfully continue on as a sellsword in Westeros, that they could go on the way they always have? He’s more fool than he thought, to not plan ahead, but the only thing looming is his need to see Nat right now, to take her in his arms and to hear the news from her mouth. 

He finishes the refill faster than he should. “Your Grace,” he begins, and she nods forgivingly. 

“Take your leave,” she says. “You’ve business to attend to. And – my congratulations, of course.”

“Thank you,” he says dizzily, and it spills from his lips before he can think wiser. “Can I ask - ?”

She nods permission, as though she already knows his question. “Would you have… you need alliances,” he begins, unsure of how to phrase it. He doesn’t know why it matters, only that he wants to know. To understand the core of the Queen he’s pledged his service.

“I would _not_ have commanded her. My sister is no bargaining chip,” Daenerys says firmly, but hesitates and adds, “I might have _asked_.”

That’s fair, Clint thinks. He can live with that. Nat could not have denied her anything, and they both know it, but an ask is different from a command. 

“And if I had asked you to remain in Meereen?” Daenerys returns. “Would you have done it?”

“You are my Queen,” he says, the most diplomatic non-answer he can give.

“Fortunate for both of us, then. The timing of this babe,” she says. “It spared us all a great deal of strife.”

And Clint knows in that moment, as well as she does, that his brilliant, clever Nat, has outflanked them all – himself and her sister and the Hand besides.

He beams with pride; he can’t keep it off his face. 

It thrills him that Daenerys is smiling at the realization, too.

+

Jon Snow looks at the Queen as though she is _everything_ in one moment and then as though he wants to throttle her the next. Clint is familiar with the feeling. 

They walk along the damp beach from the caves after a day spent entirely mining for dragonglass, which is proving increasingly difficult to work with. The sun already sunk beneath the horizon. Everything is black and wet and cold; Dragonstone is not a homey place, but it’s an intensely beautiful one. 

It suits the Stormborn twins entirely.

“If I could have one conversation with her that doesn’t devolve into an argument about the Seven bloody Kingdoms,” Jon grouses. “Six or seven, what will it _matter_ on the other side of the White Walkers?”

Clint shrugs. “I’m king of nothing and wouldn’t want to be,” he says.

“So you’re on my side?” Jon says, like a petulant child, and Clint laughs. 

“I’m on the side of my wife,” he says. “And my wife is definitely at the side of her sister. You’ll have to look elsewhere for allies in Dragonstone, Jon Snow.”

“She’s a good woman, I suppose,” Jon grumbles, like it costs him something to say it. “I do _like_ her very much.”

They begin to wind their way up the long stone staircase. Even from this far below, when Clint looks up, he can see Nat at the top, lighting the torches beside the doors to guide their way. 

He thinks of her pale hair, spread across the pillow with moonlight caught in it. He thinks of the war they have waded into, the very middle of it with this solemn man as a potential ally they desperately need at their side. He thinks of watching Nat laugh with Daenerys and the visible joy that blooms in her from having her sister at her side again. 

He thinks of the swell of her belly and her delighted gasp as he lay his cheek against it last night and felt their child kicking out against him.

No guarantees in this world that is an ugly, unforgiving place. 

But it feels like a certainty when he grins at the man who calls himself King in the North. “Ten years from now, you and I will be having this same conversation about all the ways she’s driving you mad,” he says. “But we’ll be having it while we’re watching our children play together. Little dragons, the lot of them.”

He leaves Jon Snow shocked speechless behind him and bounds up the stairs to everything that’s waiting. 

Everyone waiting for him to come home.

  
  



	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I told [beneathground](http://archiveofourown.org/users/beneathground) I was absolutely not doing more of this, but she asked for more and I've lived most of my fandom life doing what she tells me to do, so this coda is a present for her. 
> 
> Also! Some small spoilers for 7x06, which airs tonight, but some of us were weak and cracked and watched the leaked version.

  
  


They were born together in the middle of a raging storm. 

They have weathered thunder from their first breath. 

If the world is quivers in fear of the Lannister twins, the world doesn’t understand the Targaryen sisters. Daenerys and Nhataerya were forces of nature split apart. The cities they shuttered and the empire they toppled once they were reunited...

If the world doesn’t understand, the world will learn.

+

Nat has tried not to become sentimental about the child growing inside her.

She decided early on that she wouldn’t let herself get attached to the idea of a living, breathing person. Her pregnancy was motivated entirely by pragmatism and nothing more. It was the fastest way to end a mess before it began, an elegant solution to potential suffering – Clint bound to her in a way that no one could question, Daenerys spared from loathing herself for forcing politics ahead of her sister.

Outplaying Tyrion, she will admit, had been a pleasant additional perk.

Not that she had begrudged his position on the matter. He is the Hand of the Queen and his job is to tell Dany things she doesn't want to hear. Someday, he _will_ have to convince her to set aside sentimentality and do something she doesn't want to do.

It would have been an early test of commitment. For all of them, really.

Nat had only been the first to realize it was coming and prepare accordingly.

"You're a very crafty thing, aren't you," Tyrion had said to her. Almost admiringly, once Dany had informed her small council of why, exactly, her sister's wedding would be taking place immediately prior to their departure from Essos.

"I've no idea to what you're referring," she'd replied.

Clint and Dany are each a half of her soul. Choosing between them would have been akin to asking her to cleave her body in two. Worse, really: akin to watching the two people who love her the most forced to take a turn wielding the cleaver.

As to the obvious problem of what pregnancy results in: she doesn't think she would _mind_ a child, exactly, even if she can't quite picture herself as a mother. She's not cold and unfeeling. It's just that she is practical. Relentlessly, ruthlessly practical, the same way her sister is. 

These things don't always work out. At an alarming rate, really, there are so many things that can go wrong before birth, during it, immediately after. If it had been good timing to solve a political problem, it had been terrible timing in every other way imaginable. This world they live in isn't kind to the weak, and there is no creature on earth more dependent and weak than a baby. 

It’s better to be clear-eyed. 

But it's hard to stay firm when Clint's face glows warm in the candlelight as he comes to her in their bed - the biggest they've ever shared, the four posts of the frame carved intricately with raised vines and crescent moons. When he rests beside her, both his hands course slowly up the sides of her belly. He touches her as though she's a miracle made flesh.

She knew from the first that they had been created entirely for each other. 

The force of the knowledge, when it hit, had shocked her; she had only ever thought such a thing was possible between herself and her sister. They had never even had separate cradles; their nurse told them often that as infants, Nhataerya would scream bloody murder unless she could sense her twin close by.

Clint was a blindside. Something meant for only her, nothing she would ever have to share.

His quiet savage nature that matched hers, a survivor who hadn’t let survival sap him of everything else the way she sometimes used to believe it had done to her. Mischievous eyes and bloody hands. Every facet of him is as familiar to her as everything in herself. She knows him from the inside out, the outside back in, and even so many years down the line, she can still lose herself in him _entirely_.

She loves him furiously, fiercely. Loves him in softness, whispers. In every way there is.

There's a vein of iron in her Clint, streaking down his backbone. She loves that vein. And she has always known what it protects. There’s something soft in him, and he’s let that let the softness stay where it is, even through his lean years.

The sort of years that would - that _have_ , made a hundred other people go understandably, irrevocably hard and brutal. Made them iron all the way through. The softness that he never eradicated is what's made him _Clint_ , and it's a softness that sometimes whispers to him that it might be nice to build a home instead of rage that it was never given.

He has always been smart enough to know better, but it's been there.

The delight that shines out of him to see it taking shape can make practicality drift so far out of her reach that it's sometimes hard to call back.

His hands are beneath her nightclothes now, hot against her stomach, and she squirms around against him as the baby begins to kick and wriggle. It makes him chuckle as he presses a kiss to her belly. "I'm not used to this," he says, grinning up at her. "You're always so _still_. Feeling you go twitchy is a surprise."

"I've sweat through three nightgowns," she tells him, reaching out to scratch her fingers against his scalp. "And she keeps turning. Pressing on things. I'm uncomfortable in every position I try, so I will twitch any way I like."

"So noted," he says, still with that maddening grin. "She?"

"When the time comes, I won't push if it's not," she warns. "The last thing this country needs is another puffed up self-important little lord born to a title he's done shit to earn."

Clint laughs, a raucous unchecked laugh, and slides up her body to kiss her, harder than she's expecting, which delights her. Little reminders that this hasn't changed the essential things, between them - that he knows who she is, that even expecting, she's not made of fragile spun-glass and he won't treat her like she is.

"Suppose we only ought to discuss names for girls, then," he says.

"Yes," she says, and pulls him to her mouth. "I suppose so."

+

Daenerys is pacing in furious, tight circles around the Painted Table when Nat finds her. She’s ordered her Dothraki guards to allow no one in while she thinks, but everyone seems to understand that her orders never apply to Nat.

“Highgarden,” she says despairingly. “The Greyjoy fleet. We took Casterly Rock for _nothing_.” 

Nat nods. There’s nothing to be said. She had liked Ellaria Sand. She had liked Olenna Tyrell.

“They don’t think I should storm the Red Keep,” Dany says. “Even Jon insists that it would be a hollow victory, and I – I am at a _loss_. I don’t know what to do.”

Nat files it away for some other time – he’s _Jon_ to her, already, which means Clint will collect on the bet they made – and goes to her sister’s side, cupping Dany’s face in her hands. 

“A few battles are not the entire war,” she tells her, firmly. “We were never going to sweep in and end this in a fortnight, Dany. And don’t say ‘that’s the entire point of having dragons’. I’ll chuck you through the window and when you land on the rocks, I’ll take the Iron Throne myself.”

Daenerys lets out a very unqueenlike snort. “You would be miserable.”

“I’d abdicate before we could leave for King’s Landing,” Nat agrees. “Still.”

“We cannot afford to lose,” Daenerys says. She places her hands on Nat’s belly, gently, as though her point requires emphasis. 

For so many reasons, they cannot afford to lose. This is only a prominently visible one, and Nat moves to say so when the baby gives a lazy little kick, pressing up against her aunt’s palms as though she wants to be included in this conversation.

“I remember this,” Dany says, softly. “Does it still feel strange to you?”

“Constantly,” she says. “She’s like her father. Not happy unless she’s got all my attention.”

Daenerys smiles and rubs a hand along Nat’s thrumming stomach with affection. Her sister doesn’t speak of it often; the death of the husband she had grown to love, the child she lost, the abrupt end to the happiness she had forcibly clawed out for herself. It’s nothing Daenerys has ever seemed to begrudge her, but she doesn’t bother to shake off her wistfulness. 

Not when she and her sister are alone together, at least.

They both drew a shit end of the stick, but sometimes, it’s hard not to feel guilty. Her own trials and failures and brushes with death feel as though they pale in comparison to Dany’s, sometimes. Moreso when they stand here like this: Nat, married to a man she chose and producing the next generation of the Targaryen line.

“Jon’s right,” Nat tells her, changing the subject back to the matter at hand. “You can’t decimate the Red Keep and look to be a beloved queen on the other side of it. But that doesn’t mean you do nothing.”

Daenerys looks more like herself once she says it; back in control, less pale and frustrated now that she’s been validated. “I’ll call the council in,” she says. “I need to find a target.”

“Then you will,” Nat says simply.

+

Of the three Targaryen children who survived to reach Essos, she had been the only one that had grown up wondering why they couldn’t leave well enough alone. They were alive. They were well provided for, basic needs and education and creature comforts. She had felt cheated out of nothing and entitled to even less. She was the only one who had _questions_ , but she had been clever enough to avoid outright asking; she’d learned early that people said what they thought the listener wanted to hear.

She’d learned early to question anyone who wanted a world with Viserys on a throne.

So she had sought the answers herself.

Nat believes that Daenerys has never held the fact that she ran away against her, and it’s nothing she herself feels any guilt over. They were going to be parted regardless; Nat’s way only meant that she couldn’t _also_ be chattel for their worthless brother’s doomed ambition. 

She remembers how neither of them had wept that night, something hard in each of them that wouldn’t allow it, but the thread of _shock_ beneath it – shock that no moment of grace would deliver them. It had never occurred to them a day could come when they would be without each other. 

Nat has hated no one the way she still hates Viserys. A bone-deep, gut-curdling hate that will never dissipate, not really, and she has had to make her peace with the fact that this is the mark he’s left on her. He’s gone to his well-deserved grave, it’s not enough to satisfy her, and she marvels sometimes that Dany hasn’t forgotten, but has still let it go.

It’s one of the reasons why Daenerys will make a queen and Nat would rather be a Barton.

They’ve reclaimed their ancestral home, but Nat has never felt the same pull and draw toward it that Daenerys has. She’s never burned with the desire to reclaim it – or Westeros, for that matter. 

Still. 

Dragonstone is greens and greys, slate and sea and sky. 

She loves the smell of the salt and the cold-whipping breeze off the water. The meadows where the dragons rest and the sound of the surf crashing on the cliffs when she’s falling asleep. 

This is where her daughter will be born, if they survive that long, and she cannot pretend that this place is nothing at all to her. She cannot pretend that putting Dany on the Iron Throne is nothing to her, or she wouldn’t be here. 

She has never been someone who would devote her time and attention to _nothing_.

If she has to believe in something, her twin is a thing worth believing in.

+

Nat knows that Tyrion would prefer if it she wasn’t a part of the small council. She supposes she doesn’t blame him; he’s never articulated it, but he’s concerned that her opinions carry too much weight with Daenerys.

Though of course, he tends to only think that when Nat happens to disagree with him. 

It’s not a thing that happens _very_ often, but they’ve butted heads over the execution of the Tarlys – he had counted on her to talk Dany around once they had returned home, and had been dismayed to learn that even upon his explanation, Nat did not share his concerns.

If she felt Dany was slipping, she would intervene immediately. If she had to forcibly drag her sister back from the edge of the abyss by her hair, she would do so. She will _watch_ her sister. She will pay attention. She will know the signs.

She will also pick her battles, and since the Tarlys have already been turned to ash and there’s nothing to be done for it, there’s no use picking that one.

The argument, however, is set aside when the council is convened to discuss the warning from Winterfell. 

As Jon Snow declares he’ll lead the charge to capture proof of this army of the undead – a terrible plan from top to bottom, but all the men are in a rush to validate it – Nat can feel the fear radiating out of her sister, palpable as if it’s her own. 

Dany would not risk him. Not for anything. 

But she’s distracted when Clint clears his throat and makes a move as though he’s about to rise from his chair.

Nat’s pulse doesn’t quicken and her stomach doesn’t go lurching into her throat. She simply pins him in place with a look: 

_If you so much as indicate a flicker of desire to march out beyond the Wall on the orders of Jon fucking Snow, you will not even make it into a boat, because I will carve out your heart and ensure you live long enough to watch me eat it._

It seems Clint is fluent in her looks, because when Jon turns to him, curious, he shakes his head ‘no’ almost apologetically.

+

“You can have as many adventures with your new best friend as you like _once I am no longer lugging your child around inside of me_ ,” she snaps at him later that night. The rest of the men will be setting sail in the morning and it’s all she can do not to tie him to a chair. “What about that seems unreasonable?”

“So you’d have a coward for a husband?” he asks angrily. 

She wants to throw something heavy at his head. “I would have a husband that doesn’t take foolish risks!” she says, her voice rising in frustration. 

It surprises her. They almost never raise their voices at each other.

“And if it’s true, if this army is marching forward - ”

“Then what good does it do to get yourself killed on a fool’s errand to rope one off from the herd?” she says. “If they march in, we fight _then_. You don’t run out into the snow and provoke them in their own territory. And if anyone believes that Cersei Lannister will give two bloody fucks about – ”

“Where’s the Nat I know?” he demands. “A year ago, you would have put your own hand up, it would have been the both of us. Are you suddenly this selfish?”

“Oh, damn you, _damn you_ ,” she yells - _yells_ , now, she is an expectant woman yelling at her husband and in this moment, she feels entirely foreign to herself. No wonder he can’t recognize her. “They don’t _need you_. The outcome of this trip doesn’t rise and fall on your shoulders! You do _not_ get to make me feel as though I’ve done something _wrong_ by telling you that right now, your place is here!”

Clint’s face collapses. 

He drops into the heavy chair in the corner of their room, lowers his face to his hands. “I know,” he says. He sounds as though he’s in agony. “I know, Nat.”

She crosses the room and sinks her hands into his hair, trails her fingers through as he bows his head against her belly. She feels bigger every day, her balance is less keen – a stranger in her own body, sometimes, and her body is the tool she has always relied on. 

“You’re not selfish to tell me to stay,” he whispers, settling his hands at her hips. 

“I know,” she says, the anger bleeding slowly out of her, receding. “I need you to know it, too.”

He squeezes her hips. “Sometimes I don’t know who I am here, that’s all,” he says. “I want to be with you. Both of you. It’s only that our life now is so…”

“Different,” she supplies, because she understands this. Completely, and it’s nothing she can begrudge him for coming up against; she’s collided with it more than once herself. “Not worse, but different. It’s been so many big changes, so quickly. And different is - ”

“Hard sometimes,” he finishes. He turns his eyes up to her; she’s faintly relieved to see they’ve crinkled at the corners. “I thought that out there, I might remember who I’ve always been.”

“Who you’ve been and are and will be is mine. I won’t _always_ stop you from charging bullheadedly into the great unknown. We’ll do that together again one day,” she promises, and she means it. 

Even with a child, they are not people who can simply hang up their weapons and watch them grow rust.

He catches her hand in both of his and lifts it to his mouth, kissing the cup of her palm. “I’m sorry,” he says. “Please don’t leave me for the Baratheon bastard.”

Nat snorts and settles herself on his lap, her legs swung sideways so she can fit. “That would make Tyrion entirely too happy,” she says. “You know I could never do that.”

“My clever wife,” Clint says, and when his mouth meets hers, for awhile, there is no such thing as slow death creeping in from the North.

+

When the raven from Eastwatch reaches them a week into that doomed expedition, Daenerys’s entire face changes into something Nat will never forget if she lives a hundred lifetimes.

+

“I need to ask you a question,” her sister says.

They’ve retreated to Daenerys’s chambers – Tyrion left outside, another reason why he dislikes Nat’s presence on the council: she is allowed access to places propriety dictates he will never be able to enter – as she’s helping to lace her sister into a winter dress, layers and linings beneath it to provide protection from the cold.

She doesn’t turn as she rummages through heaps of clothing, trying to find the thick cream overcoat that she _knows_ is somewhere in the depths. “So ask me,” she says, distracted. 

Daenerys is quiet. 

That’s what makes her turn from the closet, once the overcoat is in her hands. She lays it out on the bed and turns to face her, waiting expectedly. 

“I don’t know how to say it,” she admits. “It’s – ”

“Dany,” Nat says, firmly. “Just ask me.”

She means _this is us. Everything is allowed with us, always, we’re together again and we will leave nothing unsaid_. 

“What Ellaria Sand did,” she begins. “Tyrion’s niece. The girl was innocent of anything but being beloved by her mother.”

“I remember,” Nat says. They’ve none of them forgotten. 

“But she loved Prince Oberyn. By every account, what was between them was very real, and she held the Lannisters responsible for his death.” Daenerys meets her eyes. “If someone had taken Clint from you that way. Do you think you could have…”

“I don’t think I would like to find out,” Nat says, after a long moment. 

Daenerys nods, as though it’s about what she expected. “I understand now,” she says. “Nat – when I look at him. I understand.”

Nat takes her sister’s hand in hers. She remembers this exactly, the terrifying force of it. The moment it became an undeniable truth. When the central concern in her life had shifted and opened to include someone besides herself and there was no longer a world without him. Nothing that wouldn’t be done, no risk that wasn’t worth it.

Everyone is selfish in love. 

Everyone is a small monster.

“You shouldn’t go,” she tells Daenerys. “I want it noted. You should stay exactly where you are. This is abysmally foolish and too dangerous by half. It’s a stupid risk and you are a very stupid girl for making it.”

Then she reaches for the overcoat and wraps it around Daenerys’s shoulders. Pins it in place with her dragon brooch and arranges the long silver chain spilling from the mouth of the largest dragon-head, just so.

She kisses her sister’s cheek and steps aside. 

She clears her path.

+

“I cannot function as an effective Hand if you will only ever tell her things she wants to hear!” Tyrion thunders, once the dragons have flown for the Wall, their queen with them. “If you’re only going to validate every decision she makes – ”

“I _hardly_ \- ” Nat tries, but he’s built up a head full of steam and there’s no getting in front of it. 

“She runs to you whenever she wants to be coddled and assured!” he shouts. “And if she dies out there, I’m _quite_ sorry to say it, but _you are no queen_.”

“No,” she says, because she agrees with that. “I’m very much not.”

He’s still angry, and she knows he’s not wrong to be, not entirely. “She will listen to you over anyone else. She _trusts you_.”

“She trusts me because I’m her twin, and because I’m entirely without ambition, and because I’m married to a bastard,” Natasha points out. “That doesn’t mean she doesn’t trust you _at all_ , it’s only a different – degree, really. Have we forgotten entirely what it’s like to have a monarch that is also a human fucking being?”

Tyrion looks like he wants to pull out his own hair. “She cannot make decisions on her _gut feelings_ and her heart alone,” he says. 

“I want her on that throne as much as you,” she tells him. Sometimes she’s still surprised to learn that she means it. “Do you believe that much?”

“Of course I do.”

“Then believe that between a head and a heart, we can get her there.”

“That’s entirely dependent on if she ever returns from Eastwatch,” Tyrion spits. 

“My sister,” Nat tells him, fiercely, and shoves away any doubts _she_ may have had on that front, “is a warrior.”

She is a warrior, and she is in love. Nat has to trust that it will be enough to see her through. 

Head and heart.

+

Clint comes to find her on the empty dragons’ cliffs. She’s watching the sun set out over the water. The lower it dips behind the horizon, the colder it grows, but she can’t seem to force herself to move from her place on the grass, legs folded beneath her.

It’s too early to have heard anything. She knows that. Still – she keeps a watch.

He sits beside her and puts an arm over her shoulders, lets her rest her weight against his. 

“I said this was a stupid plan,” she says. “I said it from the beginning. Damn Jon Snow to whatever hell would take him.”

Clint lays his lips against her temple. “You wanted to go with her,” he says. So quietly, and she remembers all over again how well he knows her. The very core of her, the place where everything real resides. 

How alike they are in their impulses.

“Damn this child,” she whispers, but even as the words leave her mouth, she doesn’t mean it.

He slips a hand onto her belly; he knows she doesn’t mean it, either.

“And damn Daenerys,” she says, leaning closer against him. “I didn’t want any of this. I didn’t ask for any of it, this – this war, this Targaryen shit, all of it. I didn’t _want_ it and now here we are, and I’ve dragged you with me – ”

“You dragged me into nothing,” Clint tells her. “You’ve been and are and will be mine. I go where you go.”

It’s not fair of him to throw her own words back at her, but there’s comfort in it, too. She rests her hand on top of his, and when she looks up at him, he kisses the tip of her nose. 

“You don’t have to have faith right now,” he murmurs. “I’ll hold onto it for both of us for awhile.”

She burrows into his side and knows she really ought to get out of the cold and the damp. Warm up inside, eat something, rest awhile. Take care of herself and the child properly.

“Can we stay awhile longer?” she asks instead, and Clint nods in acceptance. 

The world doesn’t understand them, not yet. Clint does. He always has. 

There’s nothing more she could ask for than that.

  
  



End file.
